Thursday, November 24, 2011

I met Rampling in Philly at the CHF conference in 2005 and I was very impressed with her work on alchemical emblems. We should be grateful to have somebody like her working on this era, the Ripley scroll, and the alchemical illustration in general. Check out the second podcast on this list. (from this link you need iTunes, but it's free)
or use this direct download link provided by Anechoic (look at it in a video player to see the slideshow of the images she's discussing)

here's a partial transcription of the first minute or so

in talking about alchemy today, I want to stress variety. When we think about alchemy we think about transformation and change... specifically the transmutation of base metals gold... As I hope to convince you today, there's a little bit more to alchemy than that... variety in the goals and pursuits of alchemy, in the occupations of its practitioners, in the way way that its mysterious processes were interpreted... Alchemy was not a monolithic entity... practiced by courtiers and artisans, physicians and priests, merchants and scholars... practitioners from a range of backgrounds were nevertheless concerned to present themselves as heirs to a single unified and ancient tradition of privileged knowledge... for all their personal diversity individual alchemists often adopted similar styles of self-presentation... by appealing to long-established conventions, not only of technical writing, but also poetry and art...
like historians alchemists were continually concerned about funding

Leen Spruit on Pico' theory of intelligible species
http://t.co/P3zoeEIQ

Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition by Glenn Magee http://t.co/2y6L2dkU

Dawson: "Only when God or meaning is present to the text but less so
to the world or [vice versa] does the allegorical imagination emerge."

"ancient literary critics rarely concerned with the interpretation of
a whole literary work...focus on the level of the word or the gloss."

The trouble, according to Silk, is that theorizing about poetry has
gone on without theorists giving thought to actual poems.

Crowther: metaphor is essentially predicative and its "basic purpose"
is "the cognitive elucidation" of what is being described

"for Plato, metaphor could have a heuristic function in a
conversation in which neither party was able absolutely to enlighten the
other."

Gods and Goddesses of the Ancient Egyptians: A Theological
Encyclopedia http://t.co/qSdpexqd by @EPButler

Hellenismos and the Future of Paganism: An Interview with Rebecca
Buchanan http://t.co/d6VyjnHa

RT @EPButler The beauty of #Bruno is that he reads everything, then does
such original things with it that "influence" seems beside the point.
"[Bruno] rejected hylomorphism in favor of a monism in which the
universal, infinite, and eternal substance was identical with God+nature."

McKenna: “[John] Dee is the last person to be able to unify into
one world view science,+mathematics,+magic,+astrology all together.”

"Modern science is an incredibly demonic enterprise." -Terence
McKenna on Alchemy and Renaissance Magic as influences in the history of
sci.

RT @davidbmetcalfe "I breached the veil of ISIS and all I got was
this cheaply printed pamphlet on intra-psychic vampires..."

"Human beings are co-partners with deity in the project of being.
This is the basis of all magic." -Terence McKenna http://t.co/FS9QMZMM
@davidbmetcalfe all they did at Eleusis was hold a stupid ear of corn
up to my head and speak the Word.

RT @satfeed: Idries Shah: On Sufi Knowledge http://t.co/MlqOq0Km
"Plotinus’s heirarchy of Being is more famous than his thinking of
any unity at all as a kind of profusion." http://t.co/h5V60dpr The Cone

Melancholy Saturn on his Chariot http://t.co/3ZiXwgyD

The Cone of Plotinus: Ontologies of Profusion and Particularization
http://t.co/Oili2sIq

Diagramming Plotinus http://t.co/tmKXp6LH

Lab Full of Flasks http://t.co/D67g7Dbv

Mysterium Magnum: Michelangelo's Tono Doni http://t.co/04HFN71i

Ficino's translation of Plotinus on Numbers http://t.co/lJRvcxlq

Dogma vs. Ideation: Methods of Plotinus http://t.co/jJObnxeS

Plotinus proposes three Hypostases of God, each progressively
‘inferior’ but still fully divine: http://t.co/3XG43eOL
Porphyry and Plotinus (illuminated) http://t.co/XAIrVTUU

Dan Merkur on Active Imagination in Paracelsus http://t.co/IasmmIkN

@globalinfowatch check out Merkur's Gnosis on Paracelsus, or his
online papers such as "The Angelic Stone" and "Nectar" http://t.co/nPtBFuTU

Trithemius gives a functional account of an angel
http://t.co/KuwSquHP

Agrippa on Natural Magic in De Vanitate http://t.co/mOQFaXN2

Farinella on the influence of Proclus on Giordano Bruno's Art of
Memory http://t.co/ZcBcENfh

Michael Maier cites Ficino in his discussion of the philosopher's
stone http://t.co/LojgEVcX

Proclus and John Dee's Heiroglyphic Monad http://t.co/cdwIJAG0 an
excerpt from Calder's thesis

Kripal
"I want this book to challenge the common assumptions people
make about profound, life-changing, mind-blowing mystical experiences."

"Pico did not intend to marry or conjoin the two [magic+kabbalah] but
rather to subjugate both to Christianity..." Idel,Kabbalah+Hermeticism

"Let us come to wisdom and union only by the way of intellectual
speculation or by sudden intuition, but not by magical actions" Y. Alemanno
Moshe Idel on Kabbalistic theurgy and Magic http://t.co/FEfOGUsf

Alchemical texts were powerful tools for doing some kind of spiritual
operation, but not for comforting readers with shallow New Age truisms

I don't think alchemical texts were designed to deliver the kinds of
easy answers that these spiritual alchemists find, but to instruct+play

These spiritual alchemy readings that I'm complaining about really
argue that we should ignore alchemy texts, since we already know the plan
What haunts me about spiritual alchemy readings is that they do such
violence for the texts, while spuriously claiming to let them speak.

Khunrath, Maier, Fludd, the later Rosicrucian alchemists, were rooted
in the Paracelsian developments. Marvelous/orignal/novel developments.

Paracelsian alchemy was a new development. It wasn't a fulfillment of
ancient deep roots,but result of interface of gnosis/theosophy/science

A spiritual alchemy reading should get alchemical matter theory
right. It does no good to interpolate anachronistic modern spiritualities.

Since alchemical matter theory was not nonsensical, but in fact a
sophisticated set of signs+discourse practices, this is where to start.

The spiritual alchemy lineage of Atwood-Silberer-Jung is based on
radical assumption that alchemical matter theory was nonsense. Not true.

what happened to me in March is exactly that "in the twinkling of an eye"23 rebirth or transformation, much like an abrupt chemical process ... as the alchemists so realized. But it must as I say be touched of adventitiously—which is the role Christ plays or did play, his work being already done. He set it in motion. It can't be turned back. He died, but he died knowing he did it. And of course he shared—he was the first to share—in the fruits of his own secret. He did add, though, that most of us would laugh at all this, finding it incredible and impossible and senseless, not to mention stupid. It never meant anything to me until March, and in March when it happened to me I couldn't relate what had happened to anything I'd ever been taught about God or religion. I thought god was up there in the sky. However, he is not; he is a spark which can fuse the total mind in each of us into something entirely new which was not there before (a description of irreversible chemical processes), burning off the dross and making stable (or as the Bible says, uncorruptible) the valuable contents. You can readily see the analogy between this and a chemical reaction in which the results are spectacular, as with ignited gunpowder. There is no way to anticipate the results based on a study of the three prior constituents, and if I told you what would happen unless you had seen it you probably wouldn't believe me. Fire is the adventitious element added; in the case of the transformation I went through, it is also a kind of fire: seen as chromatic phosphene activity. Probably this is radiation phosphene stimulation; the Soviets say that such radiation stimulating phosphene activity can come here—and does—from sidereal space. I believe it. This is the catalyst. The valuable aspect of the external catalyst is that it keeps the process within the control of who it is who controls these things; it isn't going to simply occur at a random time for no reason at all. The universal mind dispatches a Mediator—which is what Christ is called, correctly—to trigger it off; or anyhow the fish sign or any Logos triggering agent.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

“Visualization in medieval alchemy is a relatively late phenomenon. Documents dating from the introduction of alchemy into the Latin West around 1140 up to the mid-thirteenth century are almost devoid of pictorial elements. During the next century and a half, the primary mode of representation remained linguistic and propositional; pictorial forms developed neither rapidly nor in any continuous way. This state of affairs changed in the early fifteenth century when illustrations no longer merely punctuated alchemical texts but were organized into whole series and into synthetic pictorial representations of the principles governing the discipline.”

"What the world could express only imperfectly, or not at all, the alchemist compressed into his images; and strange as they are, they often speak a more intelligible language than is found in his clumsy philosophical concepts."
Mircea Eliade, M. The Forge and the Crucible, p.223.

Often in attempting to grasp within our thought the ideas illustrated by the images or sense with our feelings the symbolic patterns that are worked into such esoteric documents, we can get lost and discouraged if we merely jump headlong into the mass of symbolism. We need some esoteric tools (in computer terms, a disassembler) to unravel the code and label some of the more obvious structural elements. Once we have an entry point into the esoteric code we can work this into meditative exercises that slowly reveal the spiritual essence woven into the allegorical emblematic structure.
-Adam McLean, Notes on the Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine

"there exists a range of deployments for alchemical emblems, showing greater or lesser reliance on pictorial representations, showing greater or lesser originality and coherence, and directed to a variety of purposes and audiences. 210
Deknamen are frequently woven into extended allegories or parables that recount the (often bizarre) transactions of a whole host of creatures. 211
the use of sexual imagery in alchemy results, paradoxically, from two opposing desires on the part of its creators: the desire to explain and the desire to conceal. 213
alchemical authors were aware of the metaphorical nature of their language and imagery
These potential ambiguities were not a drawback for alchemical purposes, but were in fact an asset given the specific needs of alchemical writers--particularly, the need for secrecy. 217
By drawing on an ever-expanding web of transumptive relationships, alchemical writers could disguise the identities of chemical substances with a host of Decknamen. 218
-Lawrence Principe, Revealing Analogies